While I appreciate the sentiment, this is straight from grandma's facebook feed.
Broken clock, etc.
Slap a cackling minion in the corner for maximum effect.
that’s all OP posts anyway. FB meme “humour “
Grass does that too. And probably better.
*Grass does not equal lawns. Go to the prairies, friends.
Trees are great and all but there's much better carbon sinks, algae is a big one.
You mean the stuff that grows in what we use as global garbage sink?
"Aaaahhh, the ocean.. the toilet of the world!"
- Homer Simpson
yep, and a lot more places too! Pretty much anywhere that has some level of moisture has algae
Doing some back of the envelope calculations we have put about 1.6 trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution. Latest estimates put the number of trees on earth at around 3 trillion. Looking at how much CO2 a tree takes up puts the average around 600lbs over the first twenty years. So combing all this if we want to plant enough trees to take up all the excess CO2 we would need about 5.3 trillion more trees, or almost double the total number of trees on the planet.
This is simply not achievable in a fast enough time span to make a difference. Nevermind that I was being super optimistic with all my calculations and the real number needed is likely much higher still.
It is simply a necessity to develop better methods to pull CO2 directly from the air and to do it on the same scale that we have been releasing CO2.
It is simply a necessity to develop better methods to pull CO2 directly from the air and to do it on the same scale that we have been releasing CO2.
Instead of wasting energy and effort trying to remove existing CO2 from the air, people should instead spend effort on not releasing more carbon dioxide into the air. It's similar to things like plastic waste where it's better not to create any waste than to recycle plastic, or the same as private transport where it's better to not have or drive a private car or private jet than to drive or fly energy efficient.
There's about 0.05% CO2 in the air. So pulling CO2 from the air is as inefficient as it gets. It's somewhere between moving to Antarctica to bathe in the sun and using the full moon for solar panels.
The theoretical best place to sun bathe is, unsurprisingly, on the sun! Similarly it's best to scrub CO2 at the source, meaning the exhausts! Filter it at motors, kilns, chimneys, etc.
We have to do both. If today our emissions went to zero we would still see more warming because of all that CO2 we've already released. First priority is to get to net zero so we can stop making the problem worse, then we have to remove all the CO2 we released. We have the technology now to do step one it's just a matter of scaling it up. While we work on step one we need to do the research on the best way to do step two so when we get to that point we have something ready to go. Pulling CO2 out of the air is going to be inefficient no matter what just from the physics of the problem but it still needs to be done and the energy to do so has to come from renewables.
I wonder how many years of carbon accumulation we have burned so far. The oil we have burned is 800 million years of algae? That's just a wild guess. Extinction is a normal natural process. Most of the species that have existed have gone extinct, we should start trying to come to terms with knowing that it is our turn to join them. Collectively, we have been and will remain unwilling to do what it takes to save ourselves.
we should start trying to come to terms with knowing that it is our turn to join them
That's just called "death". Everything that lives today is descended from an organism that existed before it. The idea that humans would just... stop existing, rather than producing variants that were more acclimated to the subsequent iteration of earth's biome seems unlikely, particularly given how rapidly we've learned to adapt to changing ecological conditions.
Given that humans - as a species - survived the Ice Age, they'll likely survive the Heat Age in some form or another.
Or we live with it and just stop producing more.
It is simply a necessity to develop better methods to pull CO2 directly from the air and to do it on the same scale that we have been releasing CO2.
Exactly this. The oil we burn today needs to be re-made tomorrow and put back into the hole it was pumped out of.
It is simply a necessity to develop better methods to pull CO2 directly from the air and to do it on the same scale that we have been releasing CO2.
No it's not. In fact, it's impossible. Turning C02 into other stuff takes energy. There's no perpetual motion machine you can use to burn carbon, turn the carbon back into oil, and gain energy. It's impossible. The only solution is to reduce our demand for fossil fuels, and increase our excess energy generation enough that we can begin undoing the past 100 years of damage through capture after we've already prevented worsening of the problem.
Nowhere did I say or imply that capturing CO2 is a net positive of energy. It is in fact a huge energy sink. If you aren't using renewables to power CO2 capture then you're just making the problem worse.
How do we get these "trees" into a decentralized block chain with integrated AI? Only then will we get people to carelessly throw money at them.
Its capitalism, no one will invest in technology that can not be patented.
We all die to preserve the market.
Oops, it turns out mass extinction event really hurts the market.
It's going to be so dumb when that is the actual argument that wins over corporate America.
Yeah you fucking idiots, ruling the ashes defeats the purpose.
"Imagine if trees gave off Wifi signals, we would be planting so many trees and we'd probably save the planet too. Too bad they only produce the oxygen we breathe."
-- Tarun Sarathe
I'm saddened by the deforestation I've seen in my hometown. A lot of kids would go to hang out and play in the forests, but it looks like only the designated protected areas some distance off will be left in the future. Having wildlife in one's back yard will be reduced to a novelty.
but does it make the line go up tho
Does it make line go up faster than last year?
If you cut it down
Trees only store CO² for a limited time. Then you need to somehow store it in the holes we got the oil out from. I prefer algae.
Algae or hemp. Hemp stores 85% of the carbon in its roots, so you can use the rest of the plant. Just collect the roots and compress them to a density that will NOT float and dump the root cubes into the Mariana Trench. That carbon will be trapped for a few tens to hundreds of millions of years. Also one acre of hemp pulls 10 times more carbon out of the air that one acre of trees does per harvest, and you can harvest the hemp 4 times a year as opposed to once every 60 years.
Yeah, algae has problems with sensibility to temp and bacteria and so on. And my duvet cover out of hemp thermo-regulates itself, no sweat.
This. Also, they're kinda slow. Unfortunately, we're in need of solutions that (in addition to using plants) work much, much faster.
You don't have to go THAT far, you can bury it over time through regenerative agriculture. Also, crazy I know, you can build durable structures with them. That said, the substantial majority of carbon sequestered by forests is in the soil as part of the lifecycle of the forest, therefore preserving trees, especially forests is extremely vital much more so than planting new trees. Restoring forests and wetlands is also vital but It takes a long time for a forest ecosystem to develop, and if you're trying to just convert land to rapidly sequester CO2, bamboo plantations and algae farms are faster.
Actually, they're starting to do just that. It's called wood vaulting. Can't tell if the lack of decomposition is a pro or a con, though.
Wetlands wetlands wetlands wetlands wetlands!
There's a tiny creature that consumes much more CO2, cyanobacteria. Trees provide windbreaks, shade, and habitats, but cyanobacteria are the OG carbon sequesters.
What can we do with what the bacteria produce?
Cut it down and build with it too. I wonder if this community dislikes that thought.
I was surprised to not see this until the very bottom. There’s usually a panel about it in a lot of the environment and conservation conferences I go to for work. Storing the carbon in tree trunks and the using that wood in to build the housing that’s required is a long term carbon sink.
It’s only temporary storage, wood, like almost all other materials has an expected life expectancy. Some will last, but most will decay and require replacement.
All solutions that involve plants are temporary, it’s just delaying it for further generations, doesn’t solve anything.
If you really want carbon capture protect your wetlands. They're truly the best.
There are all these micro machines that suck up a lot more C02 it is called hemp
A tree absorbs about 25 kg of CO2 per year. A human breathes out about 250 kg of CO2 per year.
Trees are great, but not all that efficient. To deal with the amount of CO2 humanity is currently producing, we'd need a whole lot more of them.
That's just breathing.
A gallon of gas is nearly 9kg.
A ton is 1000kg. And it costs about $160 to capture it. So $1.44 per gallon to recapture it's CO2.
Costs are USD.
Could you imagine a 40% tax on gasoline to pay for carbon capture?
We're all fucked.
I can imagine a 40% tax on gasoline, and I'd love it. But, I think it would be nearly impossible to get it done in modern North America.
People making decisions decades before we were born were happy to create a world where car travel dominated. We were born into a world where it's hard to get around in any other way. Young kids today may be willing to make the sacrifices necessary to save the world, but almost everybody else thinks it's too inconvenient.
Yeah, we're fucked. Or at least the generations who will have to live in this hellhole we created are.
Could you imagine a 40% tax on gasoline to pay for carbon capture?
Yes. Yes I can. Most of the world already pays more than that in tax on petrol anyway.
The UK currently pays 53p/litre in duty, and an extra 20% in VAT, meaning a 145p litre of petrol is currently charged 53% in tax.
Ramp the price up, watch use fall. People will use less. People will buy smaller cars, and travel less, and use public transport. Coddling motorists will fix precisely fuck all.
Luckily for us it's not just trees though of course. there's like 400 something trees per person though and many other plants and organisms that also help as carbon sinks. Grasses and other plants cover the ground and sink tons of CO2. It's pretty cool to look up how much CO2 capture per different organisms like an acre of grass etc.
Yeah, nature is great. If all it had to handle were billions of people breathing we'd have no issues.
The problem is that modern machines are extremely efficient at dumping CO2 into the atmosphere, but as great as trees are, they're not all that efficient at removing it. So, if we want to keep CO2 at survivable levels, we either need fewer CO2-emitting machines (ideal) or a machine that takes CO2 out of the atmosphere (so far, impossible at scale). Simply relying on trees isn't going to cut it.
Trees are great but part of a larger picture of ecosystems that do a great job of taking co2 out of air and building with it. Soil is a huge deal for how effective ecosystems are at scrubbing co2. All plants die off and decay but much of their carbon can get sequestered into the soil. Healthy soil has deeper microbes and insects breaking down and sequestering better, and improving future plants growth.
Basically stop lawnmowing and industrial farming.
We burned millions of years of plant growth within a few hundred years. Trees alone won’t make a dent within the time frame that’s necessary to stave off that 2 degrees increase. Even if we covered every square meter on the planet with trees. We need to start using every solution we can think of to slow down climate change within a few generations. This includes natural solutions like trees, plants and algae and man made solution like sequestering, direct air capture and even geo engineering.
I'm pretty sure if we figured out how to cover every square inch of the planet with trees it would fix the problem.
But we'd also need sci-fi tech to be able to grow trees in Antarctica
click to waste your time
So it turns out that trees are actually carbon neutral, and aren’t carbon sinks like previously assumed.
The tree does store co2 in a sense, but as much co2 is also produced by the tree during its life cycle, it’s leafs are eaten by bugs, the leaves that fall to the ground decompose and also provide feed to microorganisms.
Now once the tree is dead, it also decomposes releasing co2 as well as providing food for bugs and organisms that all turn it to co2 as well.
Nature is wonderful, but they were completely wrong about trees scrubbing co2 from the atmosphere.
If the tree dies or is cut down and burnt, then absolutely, yeah. But a tree can survive for many decades, which is time when the CO2 is not in the atmosphere. Ultimately, the solution is to plant more trees and not cut them down until enough CO2 is bound.
You can turn it into biochar. (turn it into carbon) the carbon becomes stable for centuries and you can put it in compost to boost beneficial bacteria, use it to filter runoff, etc. You can just crush it and just throw it on the grass. You get about 50% stable carbon from whatever biomass you use.
A solution for a small but notable chunk of the problem perhaps.
There’s no way that we can solve the entire problem that way.
Before human civilisation trees covered entire nations that are mostly bare today. Humanity cut down a lot of trees during prehistory, and it presumably had an impact on the climate. But it was nothing compared to our fossil fuel burning.
And that’s pretty much the upper limit of what we can dream of achieving, realistically it seems unlikely that the UK will ever go back to mostly woodland, what countries will? Its have to be most of the countries in viable climates, and probably means most farmland, and we’d still just make a small blip compared to the scale of the problem.
Once we’re truly carbon neutral, and we’ve covered the world in trees, we’ll still have more carbon in the atmosphere, a lot more, and I guess a few billion starving people since we’ve turned the farms into forests that can’t sustain our population, and we’d still be a few degrees warmer.
We need a way to turn co2 back to solid carbon that won’t decompose, that’s the only way out long term (lower priority than carbon neutral of course).
Not to say that planting trees is bad or anything, it’s just not a solution to the level of problem we’ve created, it never could be.
They're CO2 storages that can provide fruits, shadow, oxygen and other nice things. That's pretty neat.
Yea CO2 storage and also help cool the vicinity around themselves
Yes temporary, making it a future generations problem… because that’s worked out pretty well so far for our previous generations….
An individual tree is neutral, but a forest is carbon negative as long as it exists.
Untrue.
Just letting a forest grow wild is carbon neutral. The soil reaches a point of saturation. Eventually the dead trees get eaten by detritivores, releasing the captured carbon back into the air.
Keeping it sequestered long term requires burying it deep - the trees would need to be cut down and transported to where bacteria, fungus, and so on can't eat them.It reaches an equilibrium where it’s producing as much as much as its scrubbing at some point though.
And as it dies off it will produce more than it can scrub. All its doing is delaying the issue for someone else to deal with.
You can see the Amazon rainforest sucking back the CO2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZ-lMDtiI-k
Hear me out, what if instead of having that tree, we clear out a forest to make a 14-line highway and 12-story parking lots next to a bunch of Arby drive-thru's that fill up the view?
12 story parking lots are way too expensive, just remove more trees and place 12 flat ones instead.
I'm realizing exactly how much worse it is than what's being said here.
First, a lot of the crude oil were burning is not comprised of dinosaurs, there's a portion of it that may be animal matter, but largely, according to what I've learned, oil is primarily the remnants of prehistoric forests. So there's a lot of CO2 that was captured, literally millions of years ago, being reintroduced to the planet. Additionally, any other combustion based power (natural gas, wood, etc) is releasing carbon captured since the last big extinction event.
If you combine all of the CO2 and other greenhouse gasses captured during that extensive history, we could flood the world with CO2, to a level that would cause all life that requires oxygen to survive, to die, including, but not limited to, us.
The planet wasn't formed with an abundance of oxygen. That was a result of plant life that produced oxygen as a byproduct.
Additionally, trees are kind of a shit source of oxygen. They need to be in a growth cycle to capture CO2. That usually happens when they're not busy doing other things, like collecting sunlight for energy. So you get most of the CO2 capture during the night. That's good, but limiting. You lose so many hours of CO2 capture during the daytime that it's never going to really do much good. It's good to have trees, but ultimately, trees alone will not solve the crisis. They might be a good step in the right direction, but they're not the one-and-done answer people seem to think they are.
The most beneficial plant life for capturing CO2 is generally algae, and other single-celled plants. Algae may not have the highest CO2 > O2 conversion by mass (I don't know, I'm not a scientist), but it has a really good track record and bluntly, it's extremely easy to work with.
The part that's killing us (quite literally) is the pollution and habitat destruction that's going to reduce the amount of algae in the oceans, and make it harder for it to survive. Biomatter from aquatic life (through death, but moreso through excretion) is basically fertilizer for algae (mainly nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium). I'm sure sea fowl contribute to the nutrients here as well.
As we destroy aquatic habitats with our pollution and marine activities, we are making it harder for the algae, one of the biggest contributors to our oxygen supply, to continue to exist in the numbers required for us to have air we can breathe.
At the same time, we're burning so much fuel and releasing so many previously captured greenhouse gasses, that we're well on track to self-extinction.
Global warming, literally the increase in the mean temperature of the planet, isn't the root cause. It's a symptom. It's an indicator. That indicator, right now, says "you're fucked. Good luck." It indicates that the planet, and the environment which has provided for us, all the necessities of life, for so many millennia, is slowly failing.
We, as a species, have suffered, and survived through periods of great heat/warming, and great cold/cooling. The temperature isn't what will kill us. The destruction of the environment, which is also causing the temperature to rise, will be our death.
Simply put, the Flora and Fauna around us, the stuff we call "nature" is being destroyed on a global scale. If we do nothing about our contributions to that destruction, we will not survive to see another millennia on this planet.
